Chapter VI

Cambridgeshire is one of the so-called ugly counties; which means that it is observably flat. It is for this reason that Newmarket is, in its own peculiar fashion, so thriving a locality. The country is like a board of green cloth; the turf presents itself as a friendly provision of nature. Nature offers her gentle bosom as a gaming-table; card-tables, billiard-tables are but a humble imitation of Newmarket Heath. It was odd to think that amid this gentle, pastoral scenery, there is more betting than anywhere else in the world. The large, neat English meadows roll away to a humid-looking sky, the young partridges jump about in the hedges, and nature does not look in the least as if she were offering you odds. The gentlemen do, though--the gentlemen whom you meet on the roads and in the railway carriage; they have that indefinable look--it pervades a man from the cut of his whisker to the shape of his boot-toe--which denotes a familiarity with the turf. It is brought home to you that to an immense number of people in England the events in the _Racing Calendar_ constitute the most important portion of contemporary history. The very air about Newmarket appears to contain a vague echo of stable-talk, and you perceive that this is the landscape depicted in those large coloured prints of the "sporting" genus which you have admired in inn-parlours.

The destruction of partridges is, if an equally classical, a less licentious pursuit, for which, I believe, Cambridgeshire offers peculiar facilities. Among these is a certain shooting-box, which is a triumph of accidental picturesqueness (the highest order) and a temple of delicate hospitality. The shooting belongs to the autumn, not to this vernal period; but as I have spoken of echoes, I suppose that if I had listened attentively I might have heard the ghostly crack of some of the famous shots that have been discharged there. The air, I believe, had vibrated to several august rifles, but all that I happened to hear by listening was some excellent talk.

In England, I said just now, a couple of places may be very near together, and yet have what the philosophers call a connotation strangely different. Only a few miles beyond Newmarket lies Bury St. Edmunds, a town whose tranquil antiquity makes horse-racing, and even partridge-shooting, appear a restless and fidgety mode of passing the time. I confess that I went to Bury St. Edmunds simply on the strength of its name, which I had often encountered, and which had always seemed to me to have a high value for the tourist I knew that St. Edmund had been an Anglo-Saxon worthy, but my conviction that the little town that bore his name would afford entertainment between trains had nothing definite to rest upon. The event, however, rewarded my faith--rewarded it with the sight of a magnificent old gatehouse of the thirteenth century, the most substantial of many relics of the great abbey which once flourished there. There are many others; they are scattered about the old precinct of the abbey, a large portion of which has been converted into a rambling botanic garden, the resort at Whitsuntide of a thousand very modern merrymakers. The monument I speak of has the proportions of a triumphal arch; it is at once a gateway and a fortress; it is covered with beautiful ornament, and is altogether the lion of Bury.